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by danjoredd 1040 days ago
I used to enjoy LOGO when I was a kid. Used Microworlds EX to make games. Shame it has fallen out of favor as an educational tool. Taught me a lot about scripting and paying attention to syntax.
3 comments

Have you seen the adult version? It's called NetLOGO and comes in both 2D and 3D forms. It is used for multi-agent modeling, which makes it ideal for things like the flocking algorithm that has multiple points all doing their own things based on a small set of rules.

https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/index.shtml

Although NetLogo can be considered a Logo, there are some important differences, such as:

- focus on agent-based modelling (feels more like a DSL to me)

- lexical scoping of local variables and inputs instead of dynamic scoping

- no “word” data type (similar to symbols in Lisp) - instead, NetLogo uses strings in most cases where words would be used in Logo

- control structures (if, while, etc.) are special forms instead of ordinary functions

- NetLogo is a Lisp 1, while Logo has been a Lisp 2 (separate namespaces for values and functions)

See http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/docs/programming.html#co... for a more detailed comparison.

Despite its educational focus and reputation as a language for children, UCBLogo (a dialect of Logo from 1992 intended for being a “minimum Logo standard”) seems to be quite advanced and also has some “adult” features (partially derived from its Lisp heritage), such as higher-order functions, eval & apply, recursion, anonymous functions (or rather something similar called “templates”) and macros.

However, NetLogo feels more like a modern version of Logo without some of the weird/unfamiliar stuff (like dynamic scoping and words). It is heavily used and taught at https://www.complexityexplorer.org , so if anyone is curious enough I recommend taking a look at their free courses/tutorials such as “Fundamentals of NetLogo” or “Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling” - they are probably the best resources out there to learn NetLogo.

LOGO has, and always will, rock.
I will need to check it out
You can download them both, and then they come with a huge sorted directory of different models and whatnot, so you can view the source as well. It's truly amazing stuff.
We're building a 3D game development environment that uses an enhanced version of Logo. It has 'spaces' that start out simple and get more complex.

You can check out our progress so far at https://turtlespaces.org

That actually looks perfect! I never thought of Logo as a data processing language or anything like that, but I have always associated it with making games because it is so well suited for it. This is pretty much exactly what I was missing about using LOGO. Im going to keep my eye on this! Thanks
Check out QLogo, under active development.

I was teaching my daughter to program with it. Quiet fun.

https://qlogo.org